Book Review: Desert Reckoning By Deanne Stillman

08/01/2012 04:33PM
● Published by Steve

By Delphine Lucas, Literary Editor

Rating: 5 Palms

As
a relative newcomer to the desert in 2001, I read Deanne Stillman’s first book,
Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave. I had just quit a
teaching job after a one year contract in the junior high school in Twentynine
Palms. I read the book hoping for some illumination of what I had got myself
into by moving to the desert. It gave credence to some- thing I had discovered:
the desert had an edge to it.

I
also liked the fact that the book was controversial in Twentynine Palms and
hoped we would hear more from Stillman. I liked her writing a lot.

Eleven
years later, after she wrote two more books about the desert, she now gives us
a compassionate rendering of a true crime story that took place in another part
of the Mojave Desert: the Antelope Valley. Amazon Books listed it as one of the
best books of July, 2012, along with eight others, and I couldn’t agree more. I
read it in two days.

It
took eight years for Stillman to write Desert Reckoning. The book began as an
article for Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. The research took time. In order to
get the information she needed to write the story, she had to keep opening her
heart to the desert, to let it take her in and breathe its spirit into her.
This is the way of the desert. People in the desert, as well as other things in
the desert, reveal their secrets in their own time, in their own way.

Stillman
delves into the lives of Steve Sorensen, the town sheriff, Donald Charles
Kueck, a solitary desert dweller, and Don’s son, Charles Donald, referred to by
friends and family as Jelly. Throughout the book she follows their connections
to the desert; how they ended up here, what they did here, and how they changed
by living here. From Stillman’s desire to truly know these people and what
happened to them, she comes back again to the Mojave.

The
story begins with Donald Kueck, a man who lived alone far out in North Los
Angles County. He was a bright guy who liked to read. He found the places
around his travel trailer that had water, so he could be self-sufficient and
also irrigate his marijuana plants and his beloved pear tree. He became friends
with ground squirrels (possibly the last surviving family in the area), ravens,
and rattlesnakes. For fun he built and tested out rockets.

In
2003 Sorensen, the sole deputy of the area arrived on his doorstep and Kueck
blasted him to pieces. To this day, no one knows exactly why.

Sorenson,
like Kueck, was a desert transplant, and he didn’t live far from Kueck. He
lived in a house with his wife and children, and like Kueck, looked out on the view
of the Three Sisters Mountains from his property. The sheriff was a revered
member of the community. Thousands went to his funeral after he was killed, and
many people told stories of his acts of kindness. He helped old people by doing
their yard work, he told kids to hang out with a better crowd, and he bought
groceries for shut-ins, just to name a few things he did for the com- munity.

Jelly,
Don’s son, is also a big part of the story. He came to the desert as a teenager
to reunite with Don after years of estrangement and eventually to live with
him. Suffering from serious drug addiction and many other problems, Jelly had
probably arrived too late to be able to undo the years of damage. Even though
it was good to be with his son, Don, used to being alone with his animal
friends, and who never had the disposition to be a parent, was getting burned
out on having his son around. Jelly headed up to Seattle and got involved with
the heroin and punk scene, becoming a hard core junkie. That was his undoing.

During
the two years following Jelly’s death from a heroin overdose, Don’s mind
quickly unraveled. It’s hard to figure out how to live when you lose a child.
He dug his own grave on his property. After he shot Sorenson, he went into
hiding for a week in self-dug tunnels and managed to elude the biggest high
tech man hunt in California history for an entire week before he was taken out.
He knew how to survive in the desert.

The
story is compelling. Stillman juxtaposes the characters of the two men in such
a way that the reader sees the essence of who they both were. They belonged to
the desert.

I
saw myself through these people. After twelve years of living here and opening
my heart to the desert, I also belong to the desert. The desert dweller can
find a part of themselves in this great book. Desert Reckoning is a must read.